CHAPTER ONE #3
Laughing, I grab a croissant before our romantic breakfast turns into something likely to consume half our Saturday. The pastry flakes beneath my fingers, scattering crumbs across the island, and I take a bite in the hope that food will settle my stomach.
Instead, the nausea comes back harder.
I have to set the croissant down and cover my mouth for a moment as the smell of butter, pleasant only seconds ago, suddenly becomes overwhelmingly rich. By the time I lower my hand, Alexander is already beside me.
“You’re ill.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re pale.”
“You run an international conglomerate, not a medical practice.”
“I can buy one.”
“Alexander.”
“I’ll call Dr. Patel.”
“I don’t need a doctor because my stomach did something strange.”
He watches me with the same expression he uses when he suspects someone is withholding important information during a negotiation. “That wasn’t just your stomach doing something strange.”
“How would you know what happened inside my stomach?”
“Your face.”
“We’ve already established that I didn’t make a face.”
Alexander remains unconvinced, and the problem is that I am no longer entirely convinced either.
The nausea did not begin this morning. For the past three days, I have woken with a strange heaviness, as though I have not slept enough even after eight hours in bed.
My breasts are more sensitive, my body feels sluggish, and last night the smell of a bottle of my favorite white wine forced me to open the sitting-room window.
I have not mentioned any of it because there is a perfectly sensible explanation for every symptom: wedding stress, too much work, meals at ridiculous hours, and evenings spent debating shades of table linen that no one but me will ever be able to distinguish.
There is no reason to think any further than that.
I pick up my phone from the island and open the calendar to check the time of my meeting with the decorator. Alexander is still talking, something about calling Dr. Patel and arranging tests, but his voice fades into the background when I see the date on the screen.
Saturday the twenty-sixth.
I look back over the previous days and scroll through my schedule. There are meetings, dress fittings, dinner with my mother, and reminders I entered myself, but one thing is missing. I count the days in my head, reach an answer, and start again because I must have made a mistake.
The answer does not change.
“Isabella?”
I barely hear him. I open the app where I track my cycle and find the small notification I have ignored through an entire week of appointments, and suddenly the tightness in my chest has nothing to do with wedding stress.
I am nine days late.
Alexander touches my arm. “What happened?”
I lock the screen far too quickly. “Nothing.”
His eyes narrow. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“I have a meeting.”
“It’s Saturday.”
“With the decorator.”
“At eleven.”
I glance at the kitchen clock. It is nine forty-two, far too early to justify the urgency, but my mind refuses to produce a better excuse.
“I need to shower.”
I leave the island before Alexander can continue the interrogation and cross the hallway quickly, acutely aware of his eyes following every step. By the time I reach the stairs, I have to stop myself from running.
Upstairs, I enter the bathroom and close the door behind me. The click of the lock sounds unnaturally loud in the silence, and I lean back against the wood while trying to slow my breathing.
It makes no sense. It cannot make sense.
I repeat the thought as I unlock my phone and open the calendar again, counting forward from my last period and then backward as though a different direction might somehow produce a different answer. It does not.
Nine days.
My period has never been this late. Two days, perhaps three during an especially difficult month, but never nine, and when I finally look at my reflection in the mirror, I am a little pale, exactly as Alexander noticed.
My eyes seem larger in my makeup-free face, and for a moment I search for some visible sign that might confirm or dismiss the thought beginning to take shape, even though I know there will be no answer waiting in my reflection.
My gaze drops involuntarily to my still-flat stomach beneath the thin fabric of my pajamas.
Alexander cannot father children. I know that, he knows that, and doctors examined the damage, repeated the tests, and gave him a diagnosis that left no room for uncertainty. Imagining otherwise has always felt almost cruel to both of us.
Still, I place a hand over my abdomen and think of the nausea, the exhaustion, the tenderness, the wine that suddenly became unbearable, and the nine days marked by an absence I should have noticed sooner.
Perhaps it is stress. Perhaps my body is reacting to the past few weeks, the lack of rest, or any one of the sensible explanations I keep trying to arrange in my head. There are dozens of them, and every single one is more likely than the possibility making my fingers tremble against the fabric.
Even so, for the first time in years, I count the days again and realize that somewhere inside all the certainties upon which we have built our life, an impossible possibility may already be beginning to grow.